A federal court has frozen the assets of several businesses accused of conspiring to trick more than one million consumers into purchasing and installing “scareware,” which uses fake security alerts to frighten consumers into paying for bogus computer security software. According to the complaint by the Federal Trade Commission, two companies — Innovative Marketing, Inc. and ByteHosting Internet Services, LLC — embedded extra computer code in online ads, which they placed on Web sites on behalf of legitimate companies. The code would then redirect viewers to other sites that warned of security and privacy threats on the visitor’s computer. “These sites would then claim to scan the consumers’ computers for security and privacy issues,” the FTC said. “The ‘scans’ would find a host of purported problems with the consumers’ computers and urge them to buy the defendants’ computer security products for $39.95 or more. However, the scans were entirely false.”